Fixed Google - Increase in soft 404 errors

[DRaver]

I have a lot of soft 404 errors in the google webmaster tools. XF sends the wrong status code.



So if i type in the url, Xenforo say. Page not found.

So I checked the http status code of these url´s and I see that this site give a status code 200.
But this is wrong. It´s must be a 404 or better a 410.

Please fix the bug.

 

[Mike]

There is a bug here, but it's not that those results are returning a 200 for a "page not found" page. It's returning a "no results" because the bug is that it's triggering another search. It's doing this because you're loading a search that actually doesn't exist any more; the behavior is to return a 404 when the search exists.

I have adjusted this to be consistent now regardless of whether the search exists.

 

[DRaver]

@Mike Is this fixed in the version 1.4.4?

 

[Mike]

Yes.

 

[cmeinck]

Are you blocking /search in robots.txt?

 

[DRaver]

@Mike

I think that Problem is not fixed.

XF 1.4.5

Soft 404 in the Google Webmaster Tools.

 

[Mike]

Those are not going to be 404 pages -- likely no result pages instead -- so calling them "soft 404" would be a false positive.

Note that what I what I fixed previously is not exactly what you reported. There was another bug that triggered a re-search unexpectedly and that is what I fixed.

 

[DRaver]

In other word's: No possible fix?

 

[cmeinck]

This might be of interest:
http://dejanseo.com.au/thin-content-update/

 

[DRaver]

Why? The search sites are on noindex, follow. So, no problem with thin content.